Are Teachers Prepared for Racially Changing Schools?

Authors:
Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley

Date Published:
January 01, 2008

Honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., this new study, part of the Initiative on School Integration, recently created by the CRP/PDC after the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decisions limited voluntary integration in our nation's schools. This report reveals the challenges for teachers and school leaders as they face many different kinds of situations with regard to race, ethnicity and class.

Foreword

Four decades after Dr. Martin Luther King's death we are a different
county, where the white population will become a minority of students
in the nation's schools in short order, but where schools remain
separate and deeply unequal for African American, Latino and American
Indian students. We need to remember Dr. King’s conclusion that
“segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives
the segregated a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false
sense of inferiority.” It ignores the reality, he said, that Americans
“are caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny.”

Even though there is no significant national effort to desegregate
our schools now (though many communities want to maintain the
integrated schools they still have), thousands of American schools,
mostly in the suburbs, are going through racial and ethnic change as
black and Latino families move out from central cities. Our
overwhelmingly white teaching force has little preparation to deal with
demographic changes now under way or training to teach their students
about the contributions and cultures of other groups in the society.
We are a country where nearly a fifth of public school students come
from linguistic minority families but that has far too few teachers who
understand their language and culture and who can speak to their
parents.

Several decades ago, when there were much greater efforts to
desegregate schools, there were also initiatives to prepare teachers
with tools to minimize problems of conflict, to combat in- school
segregation, and to contest stereotypes and maximize learning
opportunities in diverse classrooms and schools. Research showed that
these investments in training teachers worked, but when the period of
active desegregation efforts passed these efforts were largely
abandoned. Teachers in diverse and nonwhite schools report more
training in how to teach in diverse settings than those in white
suburbs but they often face testing pressures that mean that they do
not have time to employ those skills or impart that knowledge.

Most teachers believe that they can just treat all students the same
and everything will work out. This is related to the fact that many
teachers come from segregated white backgrounds where they have not
been trained to understand and deal with other cultures effectively.
Treating everyone the same translates into simply assuming that all
children will understand and respond to the methods and approaches that
their teachers are familiar with, an assumption not supported by
research and experience.